...sometimes that is heavy

I wrote over a week ago. Old school style, in my journal, with a pen. It started out just for me: ramblings, thoughts weighing on my heart. I haven't' been able to stop thinking about it so I decided to share it.

Do you ever have one of those days where you feel like there's something deep inside of you just waiting to come out of your mouth? Like you can physically feel it simmering in your chest? 

I feel it but I don't have the words yet. I'm sitting in the sun at our dinning room table watching my kids as the play outside. The window providing a perfect viewing of two best friends exploring a world they've created in their imaginations.  I'm listening to music, feeling my heart beat heavily in my chest. I rarely write like this anymore, pen to paper and as I continue I'm mentally critiqing my handwriting. I never received penmanship awards. I remember envying my girlfriends with their perfect bubbly penmanship. I remember a boy once telling me I squish my letters too close together. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about what my spiritual gifts might be. Do I have any? Is it hard for me to see but easy for someone on the outside looking in to see? I started a spiritual gifts test online and bailed halfway through. I felt discouraged by my answers. Introspection fills me full of self doubt...questions.  

This isn't making my heart feel any less heavy. What happened to writing being my therapeutic outlet?

Sometimes I feel like a fraud doing this whole motherhood thing. I don't know what I am doing one day to the next. I don't know if I am using the right discipline methods. Do I discipline enough?  Do I discipline from a place of love or anger? Am I nurturing their individuality? Am I using words that build them up? Am I encouraging them enough? 

I sometimes feel like a misplaced person. Plucked up and dropped into this life and I am turning circles, taking in the things around me. The house, the kids, the husband...and I start spinning faster and faster until it's all a blur and I am wondering how did I get here? Wasn't I just 18 wondering if college was right for me? 

Now I am deep into this life and I'd be lying if I said I didn't question....if I made a different choice here or there would I have still ended up here? Playing house? I ask myself could I have been more and as soon as I think it I feel like I'm betraying the people I love most. But I am human  and I peeked down the rabbit hole and more questions come rushing out. 

I can hear their laughter trickling in on the breeze through the open windows. The sound making me feel as if I've been caught for even questioning. My thoughts instantly change. I am everything to them. I am their world. Why can't that be enough for me? It should be enough and more. These little humans I call mine, life wouldn't be without them. 

I think about the way she says "right mama?" My heart hurts with overwhelming love. I told my husband I wanted to record her saying it, to forever have her innocent, trusting voice saying "mama" in just that way. I never tire of it. 

I have it all and more. In a world overflowing with material things, I've got the true treasure. My people, the unconditional love. It's not a perfectly curated image filtered with the right glow.  It is messy. It is hard. It's loud and confusing and frustrating and painfully beautiful. It's ordinary and unexpectedly extraordinary.  I stumble through each day falling more times...too many times. It's tears and forgiveness. It's the new days. Oh the new days, another chance. 

Maybe the pain in my heart isn't something deep and euphoric trying to find it's way onto my paper. Maybe it's my heart breaking a million times over how fleeting it all is. I blink and they are not babies anymore. I lose my temper and that moment is time stamped, never to be taken back. That moment just gone. Maybe it' too much love bursting to get out or tears needing to fall. I am everything to them and sometimes that is heavy.